Archive for August 28, 2012

I *think* I’m allowed to talk about this, as long as I don’t say anything…

First, I’m sorry for not mentioning it sooner, but I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement and I don’t want to betray the trust placed in me. A few months ago, producer David Brown came to me with an intriguing proposition: a big film he was involved in (he line-produces big films) was seeking a little help. There was a sequence in the film involving a media sensation, and so the film required lots of little bits, short segments that might be news items, discussion shows, YouTube clips, anything which could be bundled together, possibly with split-screen, to suggest a media furore. Rather than create all this stuff with a full feature film crew at vast expense, the makers of the film thought it would be fun, and nice, to give the job to a bunch of film students and see what they came up with.

Since I teach part-time at Edinburgh College of Art and I know David, I was the conduit. But of course I wanted to get in on the act, so I volunteered to direct a little segment myself.

So now, me and a bunch of students from ECA and also Napier Screen Academy have contributed little segments, mostly around twenty seconds, some of which have been used in the final edit, of CLOUD ATLAS, the new film from Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. Here they are —

Wonderful to finally have Lana Wachowski in the spotlight, by the way. I think she’ll be an inspirational role model. There aren’t that many high profile transgender people. I’m not counting Michael Cimino because (1) Who knows what’s going on there and (2) High profile?

Now, I haven’t seen CLOUD ATLAS but I’m excited to do so, not just for my twenty second bit, which will probably be split-screened with a lot of other material, even if it’s visible in its entirety. I’m psyched about the whole film, for its astonishing ambition.

Visible in the trailer is my pal Niall Fulton (screen right at 2:27), who was in CRY FOR BOBO as the policeman who gets the bucket of water on his head. And the rest of the cast is a remarkable bunch — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent…